Mezmorizor
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 14, 2021
- Messages
- 19
Bottom line is that the AI in Civ 4 is hard to beat and playing a Civ 4 difficulty is equivalent to playing at least 3 difficulties up on unmodded V-VII. Maybe more. It's not rare to find maps literally nobody can beat on Civ 4 deity, and that's still true to this day where people have been at it for 20 years and you would be mocked for talking about core strategies of 15 years ago like "specialist/cottage economy", "city specialization", or "axe rush". Okay, you probably wouldn't be mocked, but specialist/cottage economy being a false dichotomy, city specialization being a bad strategy, and axe rushes being simply bad are commonly known and you would be told to stop reading strategy articles written by emperor players 15 years ago.Yeah, it's not like the deity AI in civ 4 didn't get 4 free combat units, a free worker, 40% less production needed to build units + 40% less upkeep, 30% more science, 40% less cost for civics and buildings, 20% faster growth, etc. The change to 1-unit-per-tile definitely made the AI struggle at warfare more, and so more bonuses have been needed - no doubt about that. But the AI is looking more competent at core tasks that it struggled with in civ 5/6, and in many ways it is the civ AI with the least major bonuses in the last few games. The combat strength boost is big in civ 7, but the lack of free units is a really big improvement, IMO. In civ 5 and 6, higher difficulty levels are almost always about starting off with a significant disadvantage to the AI and watching the disadvantage disappear as you make up for their advanced start. From what I've seen so far, it's looking like civ 7's AI bonuses aren't hugely focused on a good start (in fact, they might be a little too weak at the start of the game right now), which just allows you so much more freedom in your strategies at the higher difficulty levels. Who knows, there might not even be wonders you just know you'll never get because the AI starts off with 3 cities and you need to do the work to build up that infrastructure before you can start trying to build a wonder
The bonuses in 4 are also kind of overly maligned. You're not really getting a true "equal footing" fight until Monarch because the AI is forced to take several suboptimal decisions for the sake of removing oddities and not being horrifically exploitable. The two big, obvious ones are needing to spend the early game building an economy (hence why it starts with defenders) and it turning off research to fully upgrade its army in peacemonger mode so you don't surprise DoW Gandhi and show up to his archer defended capital with riflemen and cannons (also why unit spammers who don't successfully war fall off hard and why they specifically get huge upgrade bonuses). Yes, Deity in particular cheats hard and wouldn't be the monster it is if the bonuses weren't absolutely huge, but nobody asking for hard difficulties is asking for stockfish where you're playing a fair game and the AI is fortnight dancing on your corpse an era ahead of you on turn 60. We're asking for the game to actually have replayability because the AI actually puts up a fight. I personally get little satisfaction from making my number go up higher (or lower), but I get a lot of satisfaction from winning more and more consistently on higher and higher maps. That just hasn't happened in Civ for a long, long time because I could realistically just play them on deity blind and win.
You'll also find that miraculously, 4X games don't actually snowball when the AI knows how to play for win conditions and builds its empire competently. Competent AI is just very rare outside of a select few devs in the 4X genre. The fact that the system where you take other people's stuff also has huge effectiveness upgrades at discrete, large timesteps is in itself a giant anti snowball mechanic. A big part of why I'm so frustrated by the status quo in the civ series AI is that I know I'm only slightly above average at 4X games as Civ IV emperor being my true level shows. I shouldn't be playing Immortal blind and stomping or beating deity within 4 games of the first blind playthrough. I have been from Civ V-VII while also throwing in humankind for good measure. Hell, I don't even care that much if deity stays the same, the AI isn't adjusted at all, and you instead just add 3 more difficulty levels with increasingly absurd bonuses. I just want the game to not be "I'm in a winning position" on turn 30. The only thing off limits to me is if the AI doesn't actually play the game and is instead some omniscient antagonist that attacks you sometimes and you just lose on turn 289 because turn 289 is when deity wins. If I cut them down in mid game, they should be cut down and not a threat. If I start the war by pillaging their strategic resources and killing their production centers, the mop up should be easy. It would still probably be better for them to make the AI somewhat competent though. I'm pretty sure even the more casual players would be put off if they knew how often the AI in V and VI would run out of time before successfully creating a win condition.
While the AI is wonder happy for sure, the only competent AI in my first game, Xerxes, was wonder happy AND settled 11 settlements in antiquity. I believe he got 6 wonders. I don't know what's going on, maybe it's hilarious incompetence vs independent people, but something makes the AI just not play the antiquity age at all pretty commonly.After starting a new game, I think I started noticing some patterns with AI issues.
AI really loves wonders. Probably more than everything else. I am couldn't build more than 3 wonders so far, because AI just builds them right away.
This probably it also depends on the "chosen" age focus of the AI.
In my current game, still in antiquity, only Franklin has settled up to a limit. Guess what? He's the only one not busy with spamming wonders.
I'd also argue that this wonderspamming is a more pressing AI problem than it simply being bad at the game. If you're going to make wonders a focus for one third of the game (really more because modern age is not much), you should stand a chance to get them at high difficulty levels. Plus it does definitely play a role in the AI being bad because wonders are...whelming in civ VII. Some standouts, but overall whelming. The gates, hanging gardens, and the bugged one whose name escapes me are the only ones I'd actually want to build if I wasn't given glorified victory points for it.
But is that because the AI is playing smart or is it because it's the same tanky 1UPT combat except units are built in 1 to 3 turns? I haven't warred enough yet to say either way yet, but the cheap units are definitely going to be problematic for the multiplayer scene where you'll always have to pillage everything, encircle everything, and slow siege everything because units cost 1 turn in core cities. This is also going to cause the game to run into the issue where only having one build a turn is problematic. I'd be pretty surprised if a builders core cities can't do double a unit on online speed.And here I am, slogging through some fairly resilient defenses. Isabella's last stand ultimately was doomed of course (no idea why her best horse is taking a bath in the middle of the fight btw), but this sort of campaign takes much longer than it would in Civ6.
More generally, I feel like influence was a mistake. I shouldn't be able to pay influence to tell Augustus to screw off, don't backstab me, and let me be a peaceful builder, but I can. On the positive side, it's also not really interesting because it just becomes other yields efficiently. It wouldn't fix things and people would hate if it's removed at this point, but it is an easy start. I'm sure my game would look different if I had my antiquity age BFF attacking me on turn 20 of exploration. Though I'm also pretty sure he only did that because the game bugged out and thought I was stacking on his borders rather than a true denouncement...